Tag Archives: TLS

Transport Layer Security (TLS, also often referred to as SSL) is an important component of a secure MySQL deployment, but the complexities of properly generating the necessary key material and configuring the server dissuaded many users from completing this task. MySQL Server 5.7 simplifies this task for both Enterprise and Community users. Previous blogposts have detailed the changes supporting Enterprise builds; this blog post will focus on parallel improvements made to MySQL Community builds.

Secure communications is a core component of a robust security policy, and MySQL Server 5.7.10 – the first maintenance release of MySQL Server 5.7 – introduces needed improvements in this area. Support for TLS has been expanded from TLSv1.0 to include TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2, default ciphers have been updated, and controls have been implemented allowing both server and client-side configuration of acceptable TLS protocol versions. This blog post will describe the changes, the context in which these changes were made, note important differences in capabilities between Community and Enterprise versions, and outline future plans. Continue reading SSL/TLS Improvements in MySQL 5.7.10→

Over the years, MySQL has used three different mechanisms for securing passwords both for storage and for transmission across networks. This blog post aims to provide a brief history of the various mechanisms and highlight reasons to migrate accounts to use the sha256_password mechanism introduced in MySQL Server 5.6. Continue reading Protecting MySQL passwords with sha256_password plugin→

Recent changes to support better security by increasing strength of Diffie-Hellman cipher suites from 512-bit to 2048-bit were introduced to MySQL Server 5.7. While this change enhances security, it is an aggressive change in that 2048-bit DH ciphers are not universally supported. This has become a problem specifically for Java users, as only Java 8 JRE (currently) supports DH ciphers greater than 1024 bits. Making the problem more acute, this change was back-ported from MySQL Server 5.7 to the recent 5.6.26 and 5.5.45 releases in response to a community bug report. This blog post will identify affected applications, existing workarounds, and our plans to provide a more permanent solution in upcoming maintenance releases.Continue reading SSL/TLS Connections to Recent MySQL Servers in Java→

Today, oCERT published advisory 2015-003 describing a TLS vulnerability in MySQL and derivative products. The content isn’t exactly news – it is documented legacy behavior and the subject of an earlier blog post describing how MySQL Server 5.7 solves the problem. That said, the efforts of Duo Security are certainly appreciated and welcomed – it provides a meaningful context to discuss how to properly harden existing MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 deployments, as well as frame a discussion on potential changes in these versions to increase security.

As noted in an earlier post, MySQL Server 5.7 prefers and enables SSL/TLS connections by default. That’s great and useful progress towards secure connections, but we know that not all SSL/TLS ciphers are created equal – some are older and more vulnerable. Furthermore, some recent vulnerabilities rely on the ability to negotiate less-secure ciphers during the handshake. Monitoring which ciphers are used can help identify connections using low-grade ciphers, but also to build an appropriate restricted cipher list. Using improvements to PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA introduced in 5.7, you can now easily do this – and this post will show you how.Continue reading Practical P_S: Which TLS ciphers are connections using?→

As I wrote earlier, we want the default experience in MySQL 5.7 to be secure by default. Part of this includes securing connections by automatically creating key material and using TLS for connections where possible. This may have some significant implications for third-party software – especially products which depend upon capturing, evaluating and/or redirecting client/server traffic at the network level. This blog post is intended to highlight for developers and users of such products potential issues they may want to consider or address during the pre-GA period for MySQL Server 5.7. Continue reading Implications of TLS plans for third-party products→

MySQL 5.7 aims to be the most secure MySQL Server release ever, and that means some significant changes in SSL/TLS. This post aims to tie together individual enhancements introduced over the span of several Development Milestone Releases (DMRs) into the larger initiative. In the simplest terms, we hope to have a minimal TLS configuration enabled by default, and for connections to prefer TLS by default. Let’s dig into the various aspects of this: